1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system, and in particular, to a computer implemented method and computer program product for sharing licensed applications between virtual machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
A virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a host program that allows a single computer to support multiple, identical execution environments. An example of a commercial VMM product is VMware®, which is a product of VMware Inc. VMware® is a virtual machine software system that allows a host operating system to run one or more virtual guest operating systems. For example, a system running Windows XP may use VMware® to run an operating system such as Linux or Windows 2000. Once the guest operating system is running, applications may be installed and services may be run which the guest operating system supports. The computing environments created (comprising the guest operating systems) are referred to as virtual machines.
While virtual machine monitors allow users to easily access multiple operating systems without using two separate desktop machines or a dual-boot computer, there can be problems when opening files which are associated with certain applications. Consider the example of an x86-based personal computer (PC) which is running Microsoft Windows as the host operating system, as well as another instance of Microsoft Windows running in VMware as the guest operating system. In this example, the host operating system has an application such as Microsoft Excel installed, and the guest operating system does not have the application installed. When a user wants to open an Excel file located on the guest operating system's hard disk, the user double-clicks the Excel file. Since the guest operating system does not have the Microsoft Excel application installed, a dialog is presented to the user which indicates that there is no application associated with the selected file type. In response, the user currently must drag and drop the Excel file from the guest operating system to the desktop of the host operating system, which does contain the Microsoft Excel program. The user may then double click on the Excel file in order to view the file and make changes. The user then drags and drops the Excel file from the host operating system back to the guest operating system. These existing steps are prone to errors, such as the user forgetting to drag the file back into the virtual machine (guest operating system), or having older copies lying around which can create havoc in version numbers.